What is this all about?
This page serves as an initial repository for brainstorming The Tao of Nature (not necessarily the final name) - a permaculture/nature simulator, that works as a playable game.
What's the purpose?
There are many reasons why I would find this simulator useful, here are some of them:- Understand the complex interactions that happen between all the elements in an eco-system
- Realizing the impact that small actions can cause over time (and chain-reactions)
- To give a different view of nature, not having man as the center of the world. Making people understand that nature works flawlessly, in it's own rhythms. Man's actions interfere and, most of the time, create bad results. Also, to learn how to convert those bad actions into good actions.
- Above all, to learn a more natural way of taking care of our planet.
How would it work?
View
The main view could either be a top/birds-eye view, like in SimCity for example, or a frontal view of a planet "slice".
With the top view, the playable map would be rectangular, and the player could visualize how things spread over space. Perhaps having differente visualization layers to analyze temperature, soil quality, humidity, etc. In the front planet view, the map goes in a full circle, but the distribution of the elements are just to the left and right, there is no depth. The advantage is that with this approach the player could also see the soil itself, roots, etc, as it is all part of the slice. I'll draw some sketches to make this clearer.
One other option would be to have a 3d planet, but the complexity of such thing would be too high to be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time.
Play modes
The game will have a free sandbox mode, where the player can, essentially, play around making experiments and see what happens. It can be used to test thing, learn, etc.
To make it more of a game, it can also have specific missions, for example, a mission to prevent the spread of a desert, other for recovering a forest of a devastating fire. The player would have a time deadline to achieve a specific result, and would have to find out what kind of actions would help nature in recovering faster.
What can the player do
In order to ACT, the player can interfere and change the game "world". A few ideas I have right now are:- Plant trees, bushes, or other vegetation
- Plant specific kind of crops
- Dig swales, ponds or lakes
- Introduce certain animal species or micro-organisms
- Change the landscape (probably could be locked or have limited-usage in some scenarios)
Other loose ideas
- Introduce bigger animals, and their impact
- Introduce human beings, perhaps the impact of cities in contrast with more sustainable communities (the effect of large scale agriculture, polution, deforestation, etc)
- Weather cycles (seasons, rains, etc)
- Differente climates to play with (tropical, moderate, desert, etc)
- Time "scales" - slow down time to understand the life and cycles for microbes and insects. speed up time to watch trees become alive, see the spreading of weeds and other large scale vegetation effects.
Contribute!
I'm looking forward to also hear from the community some feedback on this. What do you think could make this work? What would add more value? If you'd like to contribute in some way, or be informed of further development, get in touch with me at: nunodonato [at] myopera.com